Nuclear Risk Expert: Fukushima's Fuel Could Still Seep Out

[bananas]

"This doesn't exist as a problem just in Fukushima, but also all the plants here in the United States. But they didn't want to deal with it. Then I got disgusted and left the nuclear business," he says.

When the good people are pushed out, what are you left with?

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/nuclear/nuclear-risk-expert-fukushimas-fuel-could-still-seep-out

Nuclear Risk Expert: Fukushima's Fuel Could Still Seep Out
POSTED BY: Eliza Strickland / Fri, April 01, 2011

It's Theo Theofanous's job to worry about worst-case scenarios. As director of the Center for Risk Studies and Safety at UC Santa Barbara, he tries to quantify the unthinkable and calculate the likelihood of utter disaster. He has studied everything from chemical weapons to natural gas pipelines--but for a 15-year stretch in the 1980s and 1990s, he focused on nuclear reactors.

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And according to Theofanous's research, if some of the nuclear fuel melted in the first days of the emergency, a major release of radiation is still possible.

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The acute concern, he says, is the radioactive water that workers have found pooled in turbine buildings and tunnels near the reactors. "It's a real Catch-22 here," he says. ... "But there's a huge amount of water. I still don't know how they're going to get out of this."

Theofanous says he encouraged the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do further studies on whether reactors could fail disastrously days or even weeks after an initial accident. "I highlighted the importance of knowing what happens in the long-term," he says. "This doesn't exist as a problem just in Fukushima, but also all the plants here in the United States. But they didn't want to deal with it. Then I got disgusted and left the nuclear business," he says.